


Reunion

by raisingmybanner



Series: get myself back home [6]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Brogane, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22321081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raisingmybanner/pseuds/raisingmybanner
Summary: "Not for the first time, he wonders why he cares so much. Sure, the Shiroganes adopted him a year ago, but that doesn’t mean that he has to adopt them. He could just check out, like he used to do, when the fighting was just a cover for the fact that he didn’t care about anything. Instead of a cover for the fact that he cared far too much...He should have known that letting himself be pulled in by Shiro was a death sentence for them both."Shiro is found alive, and Keith sees him for the first time in 10 months.
Series: get myself back home [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/725445
Kudos: 19





	Reunion

The clock reads 3:26am and Keith is awake. His sleeping habits have spiraled in the past 10 months, and without even school to regulate the daytime hours from the night now that it’s summer, the concept of time is all but gone. He falls asleep when he can’t stay awake any longer, and sleeps until the nightmares wake him up. When he’s awake, everything has the fuzzy edges of a dream, and when he’s asleep, the terror is crystal clear.

He thinks of ways to describe how he feels about sleep, talking in his head to the woman his parents had started taking him to on order from the school after his last suspension. Beth. He doesn’t talk to her during sessions, but in the dark, ghostly hours where he’s somewhere between sleep and awake, between dead and alive, he talks to her in his head.

Does that make him crazy?

Probably.

Not for the first time, he wonders why he cares so much. He’d been in more foster homes than he could possibly remember, even if he cared to try. Sure, the Shiroganes adopted him a year ago, but that doesn’t mean that _he_ has to adopt _them_. He could just check out, like he used to do, when the fighting was just a cover for the fact that he didn’t care about anything. Instead of a cover for the fact that he cared far too much about this boy, this man, he had only known for three years.

He should have known that letting himself be pulled in by Shiro was a death sentence for them both.

_Not death,_ he clamps down on that thought immediately. He had imagined Shiro dying in every horrific way possible, the scenes bleeding from nightmares to waking dreams after the box he got two months ago. There’s a part of him that knows Shiro has to be dead, that there’s no reason to hold out hope for anything else. But there’s another part of him, an unfamiliar part, that refuses to let go. Even though it makes everything a hundred times worse. He can’t stop hoping, no matter how hard he tries, and it burns him up inside.

In the silence of the house, he hears his father shift on the couch downstairs, then stand up. He heads for the stairs and Keith closes his eyes. His father doesn’t check on him every day anymore, but he still does occasionally. The doorknob jiggles, then opens. A beam of light streaks across his chest, flaring unexpected light onto his eyelids that makes him squint. He’d turned the hall light on?

“Keith?” his father is next to him in a second, his voice strange and hoarse, his body blocking the light from the hallway. “Keith, wake up.”

“What’s going on?” Keith mumbles, his own voice sounding weird and strangled too. His heart starts pounding, his mind racing, a million reasons siphoning through him with no time to consider any of them. The loudest one pulses, _”They found his body.”_

“They found him,” his father says, walking toward the dresser and fumbling to grab some clothes off the floor. His hands are shaking; Keith can see that even though his eyes are barely open and still adjusting to the light. “He’s at Mercy.”

He throws a shirt and some basketball shorts at Keith, but Keith’s already standing. He still has his jeans on, but he trades out the shirt; the one he was sleeping in was almost threadbare from age and use. His father’s already walking out the door before the choked question can squeeze out of his lungs, “Dead or alive?”

He slams his feet into the holey shoes, not bothering with the laces, and lingers in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom. His mother looks frozen, sitting up in bed, his father’s hands on her shoulders.

“They found him, they found him,” his father says, his voice cracking as she pulls him into a hug that almost makes him lose his balance.

Then she’s standing and her hands are fluttering around the room, looking for anything to wear that she can leave the house in.

“Go start the car, Keith,” she says, when her eyes land on him. They’re hazy with the exhaustion he feels in his bones, the anger and defeat and horror he sees whenever he looks at either of them, like he’s looking in a mirror.

He nods and runs down the stairs, grabbing his hoodie and the keys from the hook before fumbling with the doorknob. His hands are shaking now too.

Dead or alive?

Dead or alive?

Dead or alive?

He hits the lock button by accident before he manages to unlock it, opening the driver’s side door and twisting the keys in the ignition. The car rumbles smoothly to life, and he’s barely in the back seat before his parents are flying out the door and into the car. His father narrowly misses the mailbox as he skids backward out of the driveway and roars down the neighborhood street. No one is thinking about the neighbor’s complaints, the single dog that starts barking at the sudden sound. All eyes are trained on the road, wishing the miles to pass faster.

“Did they say anything else, Henry?” his mother asks.

“Just that he’s at Mercy, and we can see him when we get there,” he replies.

Dead or alive? The fact that he hasn’t said it yet, that the look on their faces is still grim, that there are tears on their cheeks that are glinting in the moonlight, makes the world start narrowing. Black is creeping in on the edge of his vision and he wonders suddenly if he’s going to pass out.

“Keith?” his mother is twisted in her seat, looking back at him. Her voice sounds like it’s underwater. “Keith, are you alright? They found him, honey. It’s going to be okay.”

He finally manages to push the question out. “Alive?”

His mother chokes on a sob, and her hand flutters to his face.

No.

_No._

“Of course, sweetheart. Of course he’s alive.”

The world shivers into darkness for a moment before swelling back to full clarity. He feels himself breathe in, a shuddering, shaking sound like he’s doing it for the first time.

“Oh, Keith,” she murmurs, pushing some hair off his face and brushing his cheek with her knuckles. “It’s going to be okay.”

His father screeches to a halt in the No Parking Zone in front of the main doors and jumps out, leaving the car running.

“If they want to move it, they can move it themselves,” he mutters to himself as they all enter the hospital.

“Takashi Shirogane,” his mother says in a calm voice to the nurse at the desk. She starts spelling it without being asked, and the nurse directs them to the right room.

His mother and father hurry along the hallway in front, his hands on the sleeve of her jacket like he’s afraid they’ll be separated. Keith is a few steps behind, watching the room numbers as they pass until they stop in front of the right number. The door is closed.

His mother’s hand finds his, and he doesn’t shake it off. This is it.

—

He crashes sideways onto the cot when he's shoved forward, losing his balance and toppling off it to the floor. With his hands restrained behind him, there's no way to stop it from happening. His head collides with the carpet, but his shoulder took most of the blow so his inky black world doesn't spin. Not that he would be able to tell if it did anyway. 

He tries to move quick but fails as his ankle is grabbed. He's yanked a few inches, but his flailing worm motions don't do much to help. A cold, metal cuff clips around his ankle. He doesn't have to test it. It's attached to the end of the bed. They started doing that when he kicked one of them out of the doorway and managed to make a run for it. It was a desperate, blind bid for freedom. He didn't get far, and now they chain him to the bed so he has even less of a chance.

He knows he's running out of chances. He might already be out.

“There, you little shit,” the guy snaps. He can tell by his voice that he wants to kick him, but he doesn't. “Get off the floor yourself.”

“Easy, man,” another voice says, but it's further back. It's in the room beyond his cell. “One more night and then he's not our problem anymore.”

His eyes widen behind the blindfold and, despite himself, he lifts his head. But he can't find the words to ask the thought racing through his mind.

“Beats me why the Doc wants him, but he'll be her problem from now on. Probably has to do with that arm she gave him.”

Everything crashes down. The air is pushed from his lungs as if he _had_ been kicked. There's only one person these men refer to as 'the Doc.' There's only one female they ever seem to refer to outside of mutters of wives or girlfriends under their breath or in the small chatter he manages to catch from under the door. _Her._

The one who took his arm.

His whole head stuffs with something thick, like congestion of every passage way both physical and cognitive. There's a faint ringing in his ears as his breathing erodes to gasps. A sound strangles in his throat, but it's too quiet, it seems, for either of them to notice. _No, no, no, no..._

He doesn't hear the one in the doorway moving over to him, but he feels the hands in his hair. They drag him to his feet and the burning pain in his scalp is a focus point beyond the suffocation of his brain. He strains against the ropes around his wrists, and the chain rattles as he's moved, though his feet haven't left the floor.

“Your breathing doesn't sound quite right,” the words are hot across the lower half of his face. He twists away from the moist heat. “Is it finally settling in? She paid _interest_ on you, kid. Practically paid double. That's a hell of a lot more than your parents managed to scrounge up in a year.”

_A year?_ Another blow to his chest, a one-two punch of words that hit harder than any fist he's ever taken. 

He's dropped onto the bed again, but this time he doesn't topple off. He's not sure he'd notice if he was.

“I'd seal you up in the box tonight if I didn't think we'd lose the money for you showing up DOA.”

The door slams shut but the parting shot has little impact compared to the rest of the conversation. His heart beats painfully against his sternum, his ribs, his veins. It's a caged cat, scrambling wildly through it's kennel for some means of escape, struggling to burst out of him. Its fear—his fear—pumps through him with every frantic beat, the nitroglycerine burning pathways under the skin. His eyes sting under the blindfold and something swells between the gulps of air that barely seem to reach his lungs.

He screams.

He doesn't sleep, he struggles. He struggles for hours, trying to find some way to get the ropes off. She said his arm was a weapon, but he has no clue how to use it. He doesn't even know what she means by weapon. He resisted it for so long, refused to admit some part of him was so dangerous, that now he aggressively resents himself for not taking advantage of the situation. For not feigning interest long enough to get the answers he needs to use it. To free himself. To escape from _her._

Every time he feels weakness and exhaustion overcoming him, he remembers that. He remembers her hands on his shoulders or in his hair, on his face. He remembers her hands on the prosthetic while he's strapped to a table. He hears it more than sees it. He doesn't have fine feeling on it the way he does his skin, though it has sensation. The exhaustion fades and he fights again.

But it isn't enough.

It feels like hours and seconds when the door opens again. There's more than two of them this time, as if they could predict his violent struggle. They pin his body and someone shoves something into his mouth—cloth, it feels like—then tape over it. Multiple strips at different angles so it won't come loose. A rough hand yanks his head to the side and forces him still, like there's a knee crushing his skull. Something pricks in his throat and his furious pulse whisks it off through his system. His head spins, but he can't figure out if it's the artificial drugs or the natural terror.

They hold him down until the sedative weaves into his muscles, until his lungs drag air slowly and his eyelids droop. The wildfire of his thoughts dims to embers, but the heat is still enough to burn. 

He can feel himself being carried, but he can't map the steps in his mind. Maybe he's given up. As the drugs sink in, it becomes harder and harder to tell.

_Keith..._

His eyes sting under the blindfold. His sense of time is gone and he feels nauseous with the shift of being laid down somewhere. It feels hard underneath him, but he can't move to check the dimensions. Something presses over his face, his nose, strapped behind his head. He wants to piece together what it is but he can't. 

His hazy mind scrambles to piece together Keith's face instead. It's been a year, they said. He wonders if he's grown. He wonders if he's still keeping his hair kind of long, and if he's eating enough. If he's keeping his grades up. If he's making friends.

He's mind feels heavy. He resists sleep like a child denying their own exhaustion and, like that child, he loses the fight.

“Takashi?”

The voice sounds far away, but it's there. He's in some white space, and it integrates itself into that space so seamlessly that he almost brushes it off as part of some dream. He didn't used to do that.

“Takashi, can you hear me?”

His dreams don't usually ask him questions. Especially not ones like that. He can't even remember the last time he dreamed. He looks around the white space, but there's nothing there that could be talking to him. He's alone, just standing on nothing and surrounded by nothing. So where is the voice coming from?

Somehow, the logical notion of opening his eyes comes to him, though it feels like it's pushed into his mind from some outside force. Someone or something inserted it, but he decides to give it a shot.

It's bright. It's so _bright._

“There you are,” the voice says. It's male, but it's somehow softer than the male voices he's heard recently. He squints, trying to see, but he can only make out a faint blur. “Don't strain yourself. The sedatives might still be in your system, and your eyes may be weak. You were blindfolded when they brought you in, and it seems like you may have spent most of your captivity that way.”

He feels like he's supposed to do something, so he nods. His eyes slowly adjust. The voice belongs to a tan and black mustachioed doctor with thinning hair and a kind smile. He's wearing a blue shirt with a black tie and a silver tie clip. There's a flaky red-brown stain on the blue near his his stomach, but the white lab coat is perfect. He can't read the name on his badge, but the doctor seems to notice him squinting.

“I'm Doctor Heung,” he explains. “You're at Metro Mercy hospital. How are you feeling?”

He can't piece together words, so he just looks around the room. It's a private room in soothing greens and blues. There's a dry erase board on the wall past the foot of his bed filled out in blues, blacks, and reds.

MY NAME IS: Takashi (there's a smiley face written beside it in blue)

I ARRIVED AT: 2:47am 9/23 BY: ambulance

MY NURSE IS: Penny (another smiley face, and the name stands out in red from the black smudges of previously serving nurses underneath) AND MY LAST CHECK WAS: Doctor Heung @3:10am

TREATMENT FOR: sedatives in bloodstream, minor injuries, psychological tests (a flower with stem, leaves, and grass in green is drawn, budding up into a blue and pink flower; it doesn't hide the frowning face sloppily erased underneath it) ADMINISTERED: saline drip @2:55am

He spends too long reading it, because Doctor Heung politely clears his throat as a nurse drifts into a room and over to his IV on the left side, checking the fluid and making a note on her clipboard. “We're calling your family. I'm sure they'll be on their way shortly.”

He watches her fiddle with the tubing, glance at his metal arm, then smile at him. Her name tag says Penny, and she has red hair and green eyes and the kind of freckles that he thinks might have made her self-conscious when she was little. 

“Takashi?”

“I heard you,” he answers, finally. His voice feels rough in his throat, scraping across the inside. He tries to clear his throat, but he can tell by the sensation left behind that he didn't succeed. He looks at the doctor, “What...what happened?”

Dr. Heung glances towards the door, though not nervously. “If you'd like, you can talk to the detectives until your family gets here. I'm sure they have some questions for you, too.”

He looks at his prosthetic, lifting it off the bed, palm up, and stares at it for a moment before forming a fist. “Yeah, I bet.”

He's not going into surgery, so they give him a set of white scrubs of sorts. Cotton pants and blue socks with non-slip pads on them. He tries to go barefoot, but the nurse—not Penny—tells him he has to wear them. At first they bring him a T-shirt, but he asks for something with long sleeves. Penny gets him a long sleeved T-shirt, but it's white, too.

He's ushered into bed and stays there, purposefully resting his arm under the blanket covering his legs to hide the metal hand. A long-sleeved shirt they could oblige, but a glove? Not so much. Thankfully, the buzzing of his mind takes that part over.

The detectives told him as much as they could: that they got a tip of a mafia hang out and ran a bust. No one was expecting to find him, just the usual scum, but there he was. They were trying to put him into a wooden crate with an oxygen mask. They were shipping him somewhere, to someone, but there was no address to be found and preliminary questioning revealed that no one present knew anything about it.

Everyone at the scene was arrested and no one got away. It's easy to connect them to the kidnapping, all things considered, but Detective Benson recognizes the look on his face, and he tells her about _her._ “The Doc.” The woman who took his arm and mailed it to his brother, replacing it with the prosthetic.

They both look sufficiently unnerved when they leave and he tries to remember where Metro Mercy is in relevance to his home. All he can remember is that it isn't the nearest hospital, because it's never the one that Mom or Dad took him or Keith to when things happened.

It drips into three thirty. At three thirty-five Penny comes in, visibly annoyed, and apologizes that they only just got ahold of anyone. Her annoyance, more than her words, tells him that someone dropped the ball. He just nods and thanks her. She asks if he wants to watch television or wants anything to eat, but he doesn't think he can keep it down or focus.

“Maybe you could use it to unfocus a bit,” she says, kindly. The soft edges of everyone in the hospital feel like sleeping on a too-soft pillow or mattress. He can't get used to it. Somehow, it's weirdly painful. “It'll be okay, hun. It just might take you a while to get there.”

She leaves. 

The next time she comes back it's three forty-five; she takes the IV out, puts a bandage on the injection point, and pats his hand. The bandage has Hello Kitty on it, and the pinks and yellows are somehow jarring against his pale skin. It occurs to him then, as many of his other revelations have, that he hasn't seen sunlight in a year. 

A few minutes after she leaves, he sees the package of peanut butter crackers and mauve cup of ice water with a straw sticking out of it. He takes the water but leaves the crackers and the water is really more for the cup to fidget with than anything. He takes a few sips, but puts it back when he realizes his hands are shaking.

He gets up to go to the bathroom, his legs a little weak as he does, and avoids the mirror. He tries, but he can't.

He can't because ignoring his slightly longer dark hair is one thing. Ignoring the shock of stark white is something else. 

There's a scar across his nose, too, and he's hit with the memory of one of the breaking his nose. Of _her_ sedating him, a fuzzy vision of a scalpel coming at his face. His legs give out and he clings to the sink as he falls to the floor, struggling to catch his breath.

He's pulling himself back into the bed when he hears it. There's a commotion in the quiet of the hallway. It's not the outrageous kind, like someone shouting, but it's the sound of more voices and movement than he's heard up to this point. The proverbial pin dropping in the silence of his too-still mind. It's then that he realizes the curtains in his room are all pulled shut.

The door opens quietly, and the lack of creaking catches him off guard. His muscles tighten only to relax. Only to send his body into a fit of gentle earthquakes.

“Mom...Dad...?”

But his eyes don't settle, don't stop searching, even as he starts to push the blankets back down to get out of bed. There's only the three of them, it doesn't take him long, it's just like his eyes won't focus the way he needs them to. But when they do, everything settles into some sort of clarity.

“Keith...” He says the name like an inhale rather than an exhale, like it gives rather than takes. 

His legs are still uncooperative but he can stand, he can walk. His movements are quick but unsteady, like how one has to keep a bike moving fast enough to keep it upright. He feels his parents' hands on him, his dad's grip on his shoulder and his mother's fluttering fingers near his side. They both seem unsure, like touching him will prove that his whole being here is a joke.

And maybe he feels the same way because when he steps up to hug Keith he knows, somehow, that he's holding too tight. But it isn't enough to make him stop.

—

Keith hears Shiro’s voice before he sees him, and it sounds so dry and so torn that he almost doesn’t recognize it. The man he sees when he finally steps into the room behind his parents _is_ Shiro. He doesn’t double-take or wonder if they came to the wrong room. But somehow, in all his horrific nightmares, he had never thought of how Shiro would have changed in the past ten months. 

The man who is almost stumbling toward him looks _smaller_. There’s a scar over the bridge of his nose that looks old. _He’s been gone long enough for a wound that wide to fully heal,_ Keith realizes like a blow to the face _._ And there’s a shock of white hair in front that catches his eye; it’s all he can look at for a few seconds before he forces himself to look at his brother’s arm. A metal prosthetic is grafted almost seamlessly onto his arm, and Keith doesn’t know a lot but he’s pretty sure that’s not standard procedure for a hospital. The skin around it looks normal. Like it’s been there for a while. His stomach turns over when he realizes _they_ did this to him, and the thought fills him with so much sudden rage that he doesn’t realize Shiro is hugging him until it’s already happening.

The breath is knocked out of him for a second, and so are all the angry thoughts that have come as naturally to him as breathing in the past months. It’s _Shiro._ Safe, and alive. He reaches his arms around awkwardly and hugs him back. It’s the familiar shape, the familiar warmth, of his brother. He buries his head in Shiro’s chest, practically squashed into it by the force of the hug, and tears start to prick at his eyes for the first time that evening. 

He takes another shuddering breath, and a sharp smell he doesn’t recognize floods his nose. A combination of crisp, powder smell that probably belongs to the hospital soap or clothes and something sour lingering underneath. His second breath carries a hint of a smell he recognizes, that he had thought belonged to Shiro’s soap or deodorant but clearly doesn’t because it’s lingered this long. 

“Shiro,” he says, or thinks he says — it’s hard to tell if the words actually came out or not, carried on the hot tears that are painfully squeezing from his eyes one at a time.

His arms fall, no longer hugging Shiro though his brother still hasn’t let go. One of them scrubs at his eyes, and the other brushes against the lukewarm metal of the prosthetic. It sends a crawling feeling up his spine and he lets his arm fall away from it, at his side. 

His mind forcibly jerks him back to two months ago. Opening the package in the middle of the foyer to see a disembodied arm, pale with death and nestled obscenely in blood-smeared packing peanuts. In the same way that it takes a few seconds to recognize a friend in a place you don’t normally see them, it takes Keith two quick heartbeats to recognize Shiro’s arm.

And that’s when he screamed.

Keith had shouted a lot in his life. Yelled. Argued. Screamed hateful words at friends and enemies alike. But the sound that bubbled up out of him when he saw that arm, greying with loss of blood but unmistakably Shiro’s, was unlike any sound he knew he had the capacity to make. He fell backward and scrambled against the wall, his eyes locked on the box, unable to move away.

His parents came running, but they didn’t understand right away, and only when the scream cut itself into syllables, " _Shi-ro’s-arm-Shi-ro’s-arm”_ did they fully realize the extent of what had happened.

When the stars sparked in front of his eyes, he sucked in a breath, and that’s when he caught the sweet whiff of decay and vomited until there was nothing left in him but a black spiral of death and the image of the arm. The arm that had clapped him on the shoulder, tossed him the car keys, tousled his hair, fixed his tie, but not the same arm at all. Dead.

Shiro squeezes tighter for a moment and Keith rushes back to the hospital, the unfamiliar smell but painfully familiar feel of his brother hugging him. His brother, safe, at last.


End file.
